Health

All aspects of health, including Mental, Physical, Emotional, Social and Environmental.

Master Your Mind

Published on by Jim

Master your own mind.  This is the heart of the message of all the great teachers or ‘masters’ that ever existed, be they called Buddhas or Christs, for they were masters over their own minds and hence masters over the world.

Meditation or ‘watching’ is just the process of watching your own mind so that you can see how it works and then become a master over it.  Meditation enables us to gain clarity and it is with clarity that we can see the truth that sets us free to enjoy and love all that life offers us.

The Four Steps or Four Skills, which I call the Four Ss, enable us to come to that place of clarity.  When you follow these steps, you develop these skills and then whenever you have lost the light within these steps or skills enable you to get back to clarity which again allows you to see the truth that sets you free to go back to enjoying and loving ALL that life has to offer.

When you have found the perfect truth that sets you perfectly free to love unconditionally ALL that life has to offer, and then you will know the Nirvana, the Heaven that is here, now, and AT HAND.

What is Unconditional Love?

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I do not want to talk about theory or philosophy here; I really want to talk from my personal experience of Unconditional Love.

It took me a lot of work, time just asking myself what I wanted, listening to that inner voice or guidance, before I realized I prefer the experience of loving what life is offering to not loving what life is offering.  AND, it took a lot of work to cut through all the beliefs I had that restricted or limited my opportunity to love.  I had so many beliefs that told me I cannot love this or I cannot love that.  With time and a willingness to look at these beliefs, I eventually saw through ALL of those beliefs that limit my love.

I LOVE to love.  Love is the richest experience I have ever found, or at least love is the word I use to describe the richest experience I have ever had.  Therefore, I had to ask myself, why would I create or allow any conditions to exist that would limit my experience of love?

With a willingness to examine my beliefs and doing so, I realized that there are no good reasons to limit my love.

So now, I can and often do Unconditionally Love ALL that life has to offer.

When I love unconditionally all that life has to offer then I am experiencing Unconditional Love.

It does not matter if another or even the whole world can love me unconditionally, if I do no love then I will not know love.  As someone else once said, the measure you give is the measure you shall receive.

Does this mean that I will always CHOOSE to love what life is offering? No!  Part of life is the experience of fear, hate or whatever emotion life is offering, and I want to have these experiences too.  With consciousness or awareness that I have a choice on what type of emotion I experience, I have the freedom to choose the experience of love or not, it is not conditional upon external situations.

I do not need a complicated philosophy or theology to allow me to love unconditionally.  I do not need any person or object to practice the art of love.  I choose to love unconditionally when love is the experience I want to have.

I also find that with this unconditional love in my heart I have less or no need to see others change, yet I am available to demonstrate that change is an option if you should want it.  Loving what life is offering makes me a softer, kinder person.

Anger Management

Published on by Jim
Punished BY Anger
You will not be punished because of your anger, you will be punished BY your anger. Buddha

In my early 30s, I was an anger addict or a rageaholic.  The pain of this anger and rage is what drove me to seek a way out; it drove me to what some call “spiritual seeking”.  Eventually I found relief from the anger and rage and not just relief but I came to be able to see the whole world at perfect just the way it is.  However, before I could see the truth that set me free to fully enjoy and love all that life had to offering I had to calm myself down and let go of the anger and rage.  I also had to recognize that I was the problem not the world, not the people I interacted with, not the government, not the economic system, not religions, not the authorities, not my family or friends: me, myself, I.  That is where I had to start look, at myself and my ways of thinking.

So managing my anger was became managing myself and how I looked at the world, my beliefs, my attitudes and my ways of thinking.

Oh, and myself importantly, managing my anger because a quest to learning how to relax and be healthy, of body and mind.

It was a process.  For thirty years I had been developing my ‘ability’ to be angry and now it was time to develop my ability to be calm, peaceful, joyous and loving.  I still have the ability to be passionate, one of the skills of anger, but now I am free of the fear, which is an aspect of anger that I no longer feel any need for.

I have learned a lot about relaxing and health since then and I try to share that people wherever I can.  Most often I find that people are just not open to learning yet, so I look for ways to crack into their hard exteriors and share with them a way out of that hardness.

Currently I am developing an Anger Management Workshop here in Berkeley California that I want to conduct in a public park so that anyone can attend.  I do not plan to charge for this workshop so that even the homeless will feel that can come.  It is my experience that many if not all the homeless people have some sort of problem with their anger or other emotional issues.  Maybe, through this workshop, I can inspire them to work their way out of their suffering.  Maybe…

How to Realize Benefits of Meditation in the Real World?

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How to Realize Benefits of Meditation in the Real World? Part 2, Posted on: July 4th, 2012 by Rakesh Sethi

This is the second article by Rakesh on this topic.  Here are my comments I posted about it:

As I said in my comment on the first article, one benefit I have found from meditation is clarity of mind, which enables me to see the truth that sets me free to enjoy and love what life is offering. Part of that truth is watching how the human instrument, the mind/body instrument, works. For instance, I can watch as life produces stimuli to the body which in turn creates thoughts in the brain, which in turn creates reactions in the body, some of which we call emotions. I have also noticed that we can re-train or re-program the mind/body to react to stimuli and thoughts differently if we want a different experience. This is what I do mostly now in my meditations, I re-train the body/mind instrument to react to whatever stimuli life is offering with positive (healthy) emotions. The are lots of healthy side benefits of the practice that I could talk about another time.

I will add here that there are many health benefits to practicing positive emotions.  These include both mental and physical benefits.  I find that the more I practice positive emotions the more peaceful, relaxed, content and positive I feel and experience life as.  I can see why almost all spiritual traditions encourage people to practice positive emotions.

What is the True Purpose of Meditation?

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What is the True Purpose of Meditation?. Posted on: November 13th, 2010 by Rakesh Sethi

This is a decent article about meditation, but I do not think the author has gone far enough, so I added my comments:

I have found that meditation calms the mind, brings inner peace, stillness and CLARITY.  It is with this clarity that I have been able to see the truth that sets me free to perfectly enjoy and love ALL that life has to offer.  For instance, I can see that virtually all the stress I experience is a product of MY REACTIONS to what life is offering: my thoughts and then my habitual emotional reaction to those thoughts.  A thought is really nothing more than an electro-chemical impulse traveling along the neurons of the brain and it cannot hurt me, it is only my reaction to the thought that can cause me stress or pain.

So I have changed my practice to include practicing positive emotional reactions to ALL thoughts.  So most of my “meditations” now focus in on practicing happiness, joy, love, peace and feeling freedom.  All of these are inner experiences and ENTIRELY a function of habit, which can be changed.

 

NHL blogger and Aurora victim, first escaped Toronto shooting (via intuition)

Published on by Jim

NHL blogger and Aurora victim, first escaped Toronto shooting.

This blogger wrote, “I can’t get this odd feeling out of my chest. This empty, almost sickening feeling won’t go away. I noticed this feeling when I was in the Eaton Center in Toronto just seconds before someone opened fire in the food court. An odd feeling which led me to go outside and unknowingly out of harm’s way. It’s hard for me to wrap my mind around how a weird feeling saved me from being in the middle of a deadly shooting.”

This is something I have always wondered about, if people have some premonition that there was going to be some dangerous situation just before it happened.  There is scientific evidence that people around the world were aware of 9/11 minutes before the first planes hit the World Trade Center.  It is like the Cosmic Consciousness know everything before it happens.

Now the challenge is to become sensitive enough to be aware of this when it is happening and both able and willing to act on that sensitivity.  I suspect that there will be a lot of false starts before one gets it down.

Trusting intuition is a hard thing to do at first, but with practice we can improve the quality of our perceptions and this can greatly enhance both our safety or health and the quality of our life experience.  It is my experience that meditation is the practice of listening to our subtle intuitions, so meditation enhances our ability to be aware of subtle indicates that danger is upon us.

I feel sad for the skeptics out there that are closed to all the benefits that intuition has to offer us.  I am not saying that all skeptics are closed to these ideas, only that there are some that refuse to even consider that we can know about events like this shooting before they actually happen.

Demonstrating Love

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Lately, I have been focused on not just talking or writing about what I have to offer, but DEMONSTRATING it. Books and blogs and Facebook do not really allow one to fully demonstrating the courage, which is the manifestation of love, that I feel I have come to share. I am feeling more attracted to public speaking, in public places like town squares, malls or colleges and making videos of that to publish on my blog. The world has change radically in the last 30 years with the advent of the internet and digital communications. Books and the written word are old school, old and outdated ways of communicating. A picture tells a thousand words and a video tells a million.

Demonstrating how to love one’s self FIRST takes being in situations that for most people would be very uncomfortable in and making oneself comfortable. It is skill that comes with practice.

For now, I have my platform, it is called Earth, and I am called to travel around it speaking wherever I can find people gathered.

Dealing with Rejection

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Most people experience reject all the time in their lives.  The more we stick our neck out and reach out to others the more rejection we will experience.

People reject me all the time, and as always, it hurts, for I can feel the fear that motivates any rejection.  We only reject others because we are afraid of OURSELVES and how we might react around those others.

It is not as if I go around punching people in the nose or anything that would cause people to run and hide when I come around.  No, at best I only speak to them and they react to that in a way that causes them some discomfort, injury or harm, which they then blame on me.  Lots of people have problems with me, but today I recognize that THEY the one with the problem, not me.

I no longer blame myself for people who are hurting and blaming me for that hurt.  When someone rejects me in any way I recognize they are doing that because they are hurting and have been taught to lie to themselves about that hurt, which traps them in that hurt.  I also recognize that they are not mature enough yet to be a close friend of mine.

I still hurt for them, and that hurt motivates me all the more to work against the sickness that teaches them to hurt themselves and to lie to themselves about that cause of that hurt.

I find that compassion for those who are hurting (the one doing the rejecting in this case) relieves the pain of the rejection.  We are taught to take responsibility for other people’s behaviors or choices, like when they reject us.  Therefore, when we take that responsibility we think to ourselves that there must be something wrong with me if this person is rejecting me.

This, of course, is not true; it is just what we have been taught.

Practicing compassion for those who are hurting relieves our hurt.  It takes the attention off us and puts it where it really should be, on the one who has the problem. When I feel the pain that rejection causes and comes from I am reminded that I do not want to create that pain for others or myself so I do not reject anyone.

This does not mean that I accept every invitation or friendship; it just means that I do not find fault in the other that makes me not want to be around them.

Open to the Truth

Published on by Jim

How does one know if they are open to the truth, if they have ‘eyes to see’ and ‘ears to hear’?  Does one have to ‘apply’ some truth or what others believe is the truth, or what is true for others, in order for us to be ‘open’ to that truth?

I am sure there are many people who would say that I am not open to the truth. Yet, I feel I am open to the truth, and I have gone to great effort to make myself open to that truth or anyone’s version of truth.  I have not gone to as much effort to change myself in accordance to what other’s believed is the truth.  This is why I think that people would say I am not open to the truth; because I am not willing to live up to their standards or expectation.

When I say that I see myself as open to the truth, I am referring to my ability to listen to others express themselves fully without needed to control that expression or without having and emotional response that would blind me to what they are attempting to express.

In the language of Jesus, I choose blessedness and do not take offense at anyone for anything they say.

Because I encourage people to be honest with me and I make a practice at relaxing and not reacting to what they say, I would say that I am open to the truth.